Criminal Minds Decoded

How FBI Profilers Hunt the World's Most Dangerous Killers

By: Craig Beck

Narrated by: Craig Beck

How FBI Profilers Hunt the World's Most Dangerous KillersSomewhere in your town, right now, there is a man nobody looks at twice. He pays his bills on time. He holds the door open at the newsagent. If you passed him this morning, you smiled at him, and he smiled back. And in a small number of cases, a number bigger than you would ever want to believe, that man goes home, closes his curtains, and becomes something the human mind struggles to hold.

When these men are caught, the same scene plays out on the news every time. A neighbour, grey with shock, says the words we have all heard a hundred times. He was so polite. We had no idea. And the whole country asks the same question over its morning tea. How does a human being do that to another human being, then pop next door to return a borrowed lawnmower?

That question is what this book is about. Not the blood, though I promise we will not flinch from it. The why. Because the why is the only part of these stories that matters, and it is the one part the documentaries never give you.

For most of history, nobody could answer it. Then, in 1972, in a basement at the FBI Academy in Quantico, a handful of agents asked a heretical question. What if every crime scene was a confession, written in a language nobody had bothered to learn? In the late 1970s two of them, Robert Ressler and John Douglas, began driving out to maximum security prisons and sitting down, often unarmed, with 36 of the most dangerous men in America. What those interviews uncovered changed criminal investigation forever. The killers were not aliens. Almost every one was built, piece by piece, by a process you can trace. The beatings. The isolation that curdled into fantasy. The fantasy, rehearsed in the dark for years, that one day demanded to be performed. The charm that let them walk through the world unseen.

Chapter by chapter, this book takes you inside those minds. Shall we begin?

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